O olho, o espírito, O corpo interminável

O corpo interminável (2019), a novel by Cláudia Lage, presents several discursive confluences that allow it to be treated as a fictional representation of historical facts. The novel is set during the period of the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), with an emphasis on that time when violence was practiced on bodies subjected to torture and disintegration extended from the physical to the psychological, from injury to dread. The axis of the structuring is constituted by the disappearance of the woman's body, which allows the author to bring to the scene of Brazilian literature a problem that needs to be explored further, that of the erasure of the female protagonist as a victim of extensive violence, perceptible in other iniquitous occurrences such as the permanence of slavery, indigenous extermination and the after-effects of totalitarian regimes. The work takes on the investigation of traces suggested by the recovery of memory archives, with the characteristics of reportage. In this way, it has three main purposes: a) it reinvents the most varied forms of violence, repression and torture against women's bodies; b) it ironically uses the metanarrative of the book Alice in Wonderland; c) it uses photography as access to the historical facts of which it becomes a trace.